In (actually less than) 48 hours now, we will begin voting. Technically, many of us already have, in a pattern that, incidentally, seems to favor Obama so far. But I digress. My point is, the game is almost over. Below are the leading indicators as they currently stand.

Popular Vote

RCP polling average (a straight average of selected recent polls):

HuffPost Pollster polling average (an average of a wider set of polls, with adjustments for state-national variance and house bias):

TPM polling average (selection of polls, and with regression trends added in):

If you take the average of all three, it looks like this (also showing the collective movement for both Obama and Romney over the last 10 days):

So, in sum, slight advantage Obama, but so small compared to the margin of error that it could just as easily be either candidate ahead or behind, probably within 1 point of each other. 

Now, there are those who disagree. Throughout the campaign, the average of state totals have seemed to add up to a different number than national polls have been showing. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has a good argument that the state totals are the more reliable of the two, and indicate a stronger lead for Obama than national polling averages are showing. Simon Jackman, a Political Science professor at Stanford, concurs, using a similar analysis. Based on this line of thought (and the math behind it) Silver’s model indicates the following result for election day:

  

Electoral Vote

Even as its polling average shows a slight lead for Obama, the state averages at RealClearPolitics show Obama with leads in 9 of 12 ostensible swing states. His lead is less than 2% in only two of these (Colorado and New Hampshire). RCP’s “no toss up” map currently shows:

Over at HuffPost Pollster, their model, which has been updated with 120 swing state polls in the past week, currently shows:   

To paraphrase the math, Obama is overwhelmingly likely to reach at least 277, with a strong chance of up to 303.

FiveThirtyEight similarly updates its electoral model with all new polls, and then makes adjustments for house bias and historical dynamics in each state. In the past two days, they’ve only found a Romney lead in 1 out of 20 swing state polls released Friday, and 2 out of 21 released Saturday. Their map currently looks like this:

  

The only states on the map that have below an 80% chance of an Obama victory are Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia, and the lowest (Colorado) still shows a 68% chance. On this basis, Silver’s model is predicting an overall 85% chance of Obama victory, and a map that adds up to 303-235.  

Finally, we have 270towin, which has built up a database of all recent state polling, and uses it to run 10,000 simulations a day. Their most recent batch comes out like this:

Based on all available evidence, Obama seems very likely, whatever the national popular vote, to win the electoral college.

Oddsmakers

Of course, it isn’t all poll averages and simulation models. There are several betting markets that aggregate the bets of large numbers of participants (like, really large- over 100,000 on an average day). Two of the largest are Intrade, which currently shows a 66% chance of Obama’s reelection:

And Betfair, who’s current odds are:

These are odds against, so if you translate them back to percentage terms, it comes out to around 76%-24%.

The betters are predicting very high odds for Obama winning. 

Approval Rating

One last data point. RCP also tracks Obama’s job approval rating over time based on an average of multiple surveys, and it currently adds up to:

Obama is just a whisker under 50% approval, and his approval leads disapproval by nearly 3 points. This is much more likely to signal reelection than not. It also, perhaps not coincidentally, is very similar to where Bush was on election day in 2004 when he won a narrow, but hardly ambiguous, victory:

Final Thoughts

Many people are presenting the race in this final stretch as “too close to call”. This certainly makes sense for reasons of better news leads and partisan positioning, but I don’t believe that it’s accurate. As I shared in my “one week to go” posting, I learned a hard lesson in 2004: if the preponderance of numbers are pointing in a direction, believe that direction over any story you may see, no matter how compelling a case it makes,  about why the preponderance of numbers is actually wrong.

With less than 48 hours to go, the preponderance of numbers indicate that Barack Obama will be reelected. 

Since I’ve been throwing everyone else’s forecast around here, I’ll add mine to get some numbers where my mouth is. On the popular vote front, taking the average of RCP, Pollster and TPM as my starting point, and assuming a 1% 3rd party vote (which is pretty typical of years that don’t have an Anderson, Perot or Nader 2000), we get 3.8% still undecided. To the extent that there is any evidence of closing momentum, it seems to be slightly toward Obama. So I tilt the split of the undecideds very slightly in his favor. And on this basis, I’m going to predict a popular vote margin of Obama 49.7% to Romney 49.3%.

In the electoral college, I’m going to go with all the states where Obama currently leads by more than 1% going to him, all the ones that Romney leads by any amount going to him, and Colorado, where Obama leads by less than 1%, and the only state where the early voting trends do not seem to favor him, going to Romney. On that basis, I predict Obama 281 to Romney 257.   

As anyone who’s worked with me in my finance jobs over the past 15 years (eeek-is it really that long?) will tell you, I tend toward a (numerically) conservative bias in my forecasting. So, to the extent that there is upside to this forecast, I would expect it to be in Obama’s favor.

And that is my final “before” word on the subject. My next stop will be live blogging election night. Join me then!

This, apparently, is my 29th posting on the election over the past year! We were all so young and innocent when I kicked off my coverage, and followed with my first bit of electoral numerology. And now here we are, with a week to go.

At the moment, the popular vote looks like this:

Or this:

Or this:

All of which doesn’t really tell us a lot, for two reasons:

1. RealClearPolitics, as you’ve seen above, currently has Romney in the lead by 0.8%. But the 8 polls that average is made up of currently have an average margin of error of 3.13%. Even if you assume that pooling them together cuts the collective margin of error, say, in half, it would still be around 1.5%. So Romney and Obama’s separation is well within that margin of error. I.e. the margin we’re seeing could just as easily be the product of statistical noise.

Similarly, HuffPost Pollster’s numbers have Romney ahead by 0.7%, but their estimate of their model’s margin of error is around 1.2%. Once again, Obama could just as easily be ahead. Or Romney could be further ahead than he seems. Or they could be nearly exactly tied. The point is, the numbers are so close together that they aren’t really useful in distinguishing which of these it is.   

2. As David Rothschild helpfully reminded all us poll junkies today, the popular vote doesn’t actually matter. The electoral vote determines who is elected President. RCP, the aggregator of the three featured here that currently has the widest Romney margin, has a no toss-up electoral map that looks like this:

So, that’s that for margin. But what about momentum? We’re looking at what the numbers look like today, but what matters is what they’ll look like a week from now. Does one of the candidates have significant momentum? To get a handle on this, I crunched some numbers.

If we compare the popular vote numbers at RCP, HuffPost Pollster and TPM for today versus a week ago, we see:

If you average the three (which are themselves averaging multiple polls, and adjusting their mix in various ways), it would seem that both candidates have, at best, a smidgen of momentum, and Romney’s is a bit larger. If you rolled the change over the last week forward another week, we’d be at Romney 48, Obama 47.4. Then it would all be about how the remaining undecideds split. Even if they split disproportionately toward Romney (and there’s good historical perspective and recent analysis that casts doubt on that), we’d probably still be looking at something that’s within one percent.

But wait, you say, didn’t I just maintain that the popular vote doesn’t really matter? Why yes, yes I did.

So let’s do a similar analysis on the swing states. The below looks at the swingiest of the swing states, where current margins are withing 3%. I took numbers from RCP and HuffPost Pollster, since both have nicely updated state by state projections, and did the same analysis of today’s numbers versus a week ago. For compactness, I’m representing the margins between Obama and Romney here, with plus Obama as a positive number and plus Romney as a negative number:

Looking at the average, Iowa and New Hampshire have the most significant-looking potential swings (>0.5%), but in opposite directions, New Hampshire toward Obama and Iowa against. The others don’t show a lot of evidence of momentum beyond what might just be statistical noise. Let’s say you take all the swings over the past week, and roll them forward another week. Even if you build an electoral map where you only assign Obama the states that would be projected to be for him by more than 1%, the map looks like this:

  
And 270, of course, wins it, even if nationally you’re behind by 1 percent. And if Iowa, Colorado and Virginia squeak past the line for Obama too, it could even get up to 303.

My take? I learned a hard lesson in 2004. I consumed loads of analyses about how Kerry might be stronger than it looked in the home stretch, polls might have sampling biases that underestimated his position, the undecideds might break more for the challenger. I convinced myself that it could be true. In the end, it turned out just as the numbers were saying: final polling averages for Bush indicated a 1.5% lead, and he ended up winning by more than 2%.

I believe what the numbers are saying now too. Obama will likely lose the popular vote, or, at best, finish ahead by the tiniest fraction. Either way, the margin will be within 1% or so. But Romney will equally likely lose the electoral vote, even if he leads Obama nationally. Exactly 7 days from now, we shall see if I was right!

So here we are, having finally cleared the last debate, with less than two weeks standing between us and finally, actually, choosing the next President. When I wrote my first post-primary review almost five months ago, this day seemed wearyingly far away. I was expecting one of the longest, nastiest campaigns ever. Instead, we’ve gotten one of the most vapid. And this is where it’s left us, a VP-pick, two conventions and four debates later (map from HuffPost Pollster):

For those of you just joining us, here’s what’s happened so far:

Mitt Romney ran a pretty uneven campaign and Barack Obama ran a pretty good one throughout June and July, during which Obama usually held a  2-3% lead. Then a combination of Obama doing Romney in with a neo-Swift Boatian barrage of advertising tearing down his business past and Romney doing himself in with his mouth during his foreign trip led to an early August gap that reached 4 points at its height. By virtue of a VP pick that galvanized the Conservative base and a solidly serviceable convention, Romney deflated the Obama bubble and inflated his own numbers, bringing it to a tie by the beginning of September. The Democrats then had a very good convention (though, shades of trouble to come, Bill Clinton made a better case for Obama there than Obama made for himself) that shot Obama back up to a 3+ point led. Then, incredibly, by opportunistically pouncing on the Libyan attack and standing behind his “47%” comments when they were leaked, Romney let Obama hang on to that lead for about a month, and grow it even further. Enter talk of a Democratic blowout victory.

Except, in contravention to all conventional wisdom about debates having minimal impact, Obama had just about his worst night ever on the same night that Romney had one of his best at the first debate. This turned what was a natural rebound for Romney and cooling off of Obama’s highs into an out and out surge for Romney and collapse for Obama. Enter talk of Obama being toast. Any time you see a sudden swing you can expect it to back off a little, and it’s done so, no doubt aided by Joe Biden proving the party still had some fight left in it at the VP debate, and Obama deciding to show up this time for the second debate. The new normal now appears to be Obama stabilized, and Romney much stronger, giving Romney a small but persistent polling lead. You could make a case that the third debate will further attenuate this, but probably not much further in Obama’s direction than an even closer near-tie.

It’s good to keep in mind that current numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt. For one thing, RealClearPolitics builds its average off of whole numbers, such that, for example, an ABC News/Washington Post poll released today is listed there as Romney 49%, Obama 48%. But, in fact, far from being a 1% difference, it was actually a .07% difference, with the raw numbers 48.51% to 48.44%. RCP hasn’t done anything deceptive by doing this, they just have a rounding standard, and they followed it. Issues of which polls they select to list and which they don’t are potentially more troubling, and have led to accusations of bias in the past. Rather than saying yea or nay to them specifically, we can observe an alternate data point, both in wider poll selection and precision of presentation, from Mark Blumenthal at HuffPost’s Pollster:

Grains of salt 2 and 3: The election does not happen today, and it is actually 51 separate elections, in 50 states + DC. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight takes this into account by doing a projection based on current polls, past trends, and balancing national polling with state by state totals. His model was very accurate in 2008, and his current forecast for Nov. 6th is a 1.1% popular vote victory for Obama:

By far the largest grain of salt, however, is that the popular vote doesn’t determine who becomes President, who gets 270 votes in the electoral college does. This is, of course, well know, but it can be dramatic how much the two can differ. Al Gore was ahead by 0.5% nationwide in 2000, but lost due to narrowly losing Florida. If John Kerry had gotten about 60,000 votes more in Ohio in 2004 and George Bush around 60,000 less, Kerry would have become President even while losing the popular vote nationally by almost 3 million votes. And the current state of the electoral vote? Even as it shows Romney ahead by 0.6% in polling, RCPs “no Toss Ups” map of all current leads looks like this:

Similarly, over at HuffPost Pollster we have an estimated current lead of well over 270 with the most likely states, and a total of 303 with all leads:

Over at 270 To Win, they run 10,000 simulations a day based on current state polling numbers. Their electoral college results for today:

And on the forward looking side, Nate Silver’s electoral college forecast current shows:

Any way you slice it, Obama looks like he has a narrow, but totally sufficient, electoral college edge even with national polling that puts him slightly behind. In the June 2nd post I mentioned in the opening above, I wrote:

“I don’t see anything fundamentally changing the picture that points to an ongoing nearly break-even that eventually (and narrowly) breaks for Obama.”

It’s even narrower than I thought it would be, but I still stand by that prediction today!              

Well, here we are…

With 44 days to go, President Obama is polling above 48%, and is ahead of Mitt Romney by 3.7%. And this is not just any check-in. At the time of our last update, we had yet to see the effect of much real news on the race. Now we have quite a bit of real news under our belts. It’s now been:

• 43 days since Romney selected Paul Ryan as his running mate
• 24 days since the Republican National Convention ended (on which, see my final review and links to the earlier ones here)
• 17 days since the Democratic National Convention concluded (further reviews on that here)
• 16 days since the truly grim August jobs report was released
• 12 days since the embassy attacks on the anniversary of 9/11
• 5 days since video of Romney writing off 47% of the nation before wealthy donors emerged

So now these numbers can be considered quite a bit more indicative than before. And what do they show? You’ve seen the graph above. Also worth considering is the electoral college map, since that, of course, is how the President is actually elected. If one takes the most conservative route of only assuming Obama carries that states where he’s currently polling even higher than his 3.7% national average, the map looks like this (courtesy of RealClearPolitics):

If we look at the map with all leads, it’s a blow-out for Obama, with only Indiana, North Carolina, and Nebraska’s split vote flipped from Obama’s 2008 total to Romney:

In other words, any way you slice it, it’s a pretty convincing lead. The odds-makers over at InTrade tend to agree:

As does Nate Silver’s model over at FiveThirtyeight.com:

You’ll see many stories in the days ahead about how Romney isn’t as hosed as he seems. Like this one for example. Most will be written by partisans trying very hard to believe, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely wrong. Indeed, to see the FiveThirtyEight model on the flipside, it’s saying if you run the race 44 days forward from where it is now 10 times, you’d expect Romeny to win at least twice, even given present numbers. This thing will certainly tighten up from where it is now.

However, as laid out above, we now have a lot of news behind us, and the debates are the remaining major campaign driver. Based on historical experience, it would be a mistake to expect them to change things fundamentally (for more on this, see this article from the American Prospect). Which leaves external events. There is no doubt more fallout from Libya, and more uncertain economic indicators. These are the kinds of things that can take the edge off of Obama’s numbers, but not the kind of things that would totally change the dynamic. To understand how we got here, I think it’s useful to look at the period since the Ryan announcement:

As you can see, the announcement, and the convention, actually helped Romney quite a bit, bringing him from a trough of 43% up to around 46.8% at his height. Moreover, the two combined took a lot of steam out of Obama’s numbers, bringing them down from 48% to 46% at his lowest point. The effect of all of this, though, was just to tie it. And if all you are is tied after the maximum burst of positive attention on you, well… So then Obama got his own convention bounce, and Romney’s numbers took a corresponding dive. Then, as Obama’s bounce was beginning to fade, and Romeny’s numbers stabilizing for a likely rebound to some extent, news happened. It looks to me like the effect of Romney’s bungled response to the Libyan crisis and the leak of his “writing off 47%” comments (not to mention his digging in and doubling-down every chance he got once these stories started to play badly for him) has been to send his numbers sideways (and even somewhat downward) just when they should have been recovering a little. And, on the other side, they allowed Obama to keep more of his post-convention buzz than he otherwise would have.

This is going to fade a little bit toward the mean from here, but at levels much more difficult for Romney to recoup from than they would have been minus his two weeks of mis-steps. For example, let’s say Romney had good debate showings that were worth a point of swing, and Obama had a string of negative external news that was worth another point of swing, plus a general tightening of a point. That would be some major shifts all in Romney’s direction, and it would still leave Obama ahead by 0.7%. Barring major crisis or huge debate surprises, Obama’s solid lead is the new normal for the race, and it’s going to be a very tough hill for Romney to climb.

Well, this weekend has quite gotten away from me, though through the best means possible (helping a friend celebrate an important anniversary Friday night, and going to the Boston Arts Festival with my dearly beloved and our cousin yesterday. So I will have to try to catch up with the remainder of the Democratic National Convention speeches today. You can find Part I of my DNC review here, and can also peruse parts I, II and III of my RNC reviews, should you be so inclined.

Moral of this story- don’t be the nominee of a party that tries to hold a hearing on contraception without inviting a single woman, and then when one of the most prominent figures of your party mocks  a woman who did testify about contraception earlier by calling her a slut, not say anything in her defense. Because if you decide to be that guy, you deserve to get this speech thrown your way, and she gave it very well.  

Awww, it’s her first convention! And darned if they aren’t chanting for her now. Uh-oh, now she’s talking about hard-working people. Too radical! “The game is rigged against them” is the line I kept hearing, but nobody quoted the second half- it wasn’t always this way. As she’s arguing now, America did invest in it’s middle class, and it’s that policy that’s been reversed now. And the people who have been rolled over by that  are the people she’s fighting for. It’s a funny America where talking about the interests of working people over those of billionaires is radical. Uh-oh, Cayman Islands. We celebrate success, we just don’t want the game to be rigged. And now she’s talking about Progressivism in the Teddy Roosevelt sense. Well done, Liz, well done. Level the playing field, fair share, fair shot, build the country from the bottom up. Her little huff exasperation sound is almost as distracting as Ryan’s weird little laugh-sigh sound. Oh good one- sure they believe in government. They believe in government to help themselves and their friends. And now very powerful on corporations not being people, and people being who we represent. Now presenting Obama versus the lobbyists on the Consumer Protection Agency, on the side of the people. While of course reminding us the agency was her idea. Is this a winning strategy for her? I don’t know, but it’s winning my vote. Now linking stealing your purse on the street with stealing your pension on Wall Street. And now closing with Matthew 25:40 and the ghost of Ted Kennedy. Go Liz go!

Ah, that’s right, he was formally placing Obama’s name in nomination in his speech. Aww, look at Rahm Emmanuel smiling up at him all starry-eyed. Like me, he wants to believe, and Bill Clinton always reminds him of when he did. Hence my use of another icon from the 90s icon to introduce this posting. We’re all in this together- the centerpiece of the Progressive ethos. Ah, now breaking down job creation since 1961 by administration. Investing in people is both morally right and good economics. Oh, Billy, we do miss you. Now he’s talking up Eisenhower and Reagan and pointing out how he’s never hated Republicans anything like the way the right now hates Obama. Because we focus on solving problems and seizing opportunities rather than fighting all the time. Cooperation over conflict, nobody’s right all the time, but the current Republicans don’t see it that way. And now holding up Obama as someone committed to cooperation, pointing out that he brought Republicans into his cabinet and his 2008 rivals. Including, yes indeed, Hillary Clinton. And, you know, while you can point to times when Obama’s been too inflexible, the other side has pretty much made the argument for him by being TOTALLY inflexible. Now skewering the Tampa convention, conceding they’re honorable people who will keep their commitments, then reminding us what those commitments are. And now selling the case for Obama- he put a floor under the crash, and has built the foundation for a future that works. And comparing it to his experience in ’94/’95, reminding us that Obama started with an economy in far worse shape. If you renew the President’s contract, you will feel the recovery. That’s it, that’s the argument. Love the job scores: job growth following the stimulus plan plus the auto restructuring versus Congress killing the jobs bill and Romney opposing saving the auto industry. Education so people can fill the already open jobs in the new economy, and what Obama is doing to support that. Man, this is a masterpiece-logical, thorough and impassioned. I understand now why folks were raving. For the last two years, health care cost growth under 4% per year for the first time in 50 years! Oh good, now he’s going after the “robbing Medicare” line. Did Ryan really think nobody would notice that the rationale, and even the amount, is exactly what he himself proposed? He’s a master of describing the other sides positions accurately, and making them seem absurd. The Republicans try that too, but outright lie to represent the other side’s argument along the way. Now shredding the Obama attacked the Welfare work requirement lie. And ending by talking about debt reduction, aka taking the bull by the horns. They quadrupled the debt the twelve years before he took office and doubled it the eight after he left. Ain’t no arguing that. The Obama plan as passing the arithmetic test and the values test. Plus a little voting rights on the way out. Fantastic speech and one that, by the way, unlike Romney or Ryan’s, passed fact checking with flying colors. There’s only one problem with a speech like this…